Body language - MoMA

Body languageBody languageM. Darsie Alexander, Mary Chan, Starr Figura,M. Darsie Alexander, Mary Chan, Starr Figura,Sarah Ganz, and Maria del Carmen González, with anSarah Ganz, and Maria del Carmen González, with anintroduction by John Elderfieldintroduction by John Elderfield

Date

1999

Publisher

The Museum of Modern Art: Distributedby H.N. Abrams

ISBN

087070026X

Exhibition URL

www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2772

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history—

from our founding in 1929 to the present—is

available online. It includes exhibition catalogues,

primary documents, installation views, and an

index of participating artists.

© 2017 The Museum of Modern ArtMoMA

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2772

http://www.moma.org

BODYlanguage

M. Darsie Alexander, Mary Chan, Starr Figura, Sarah Ganz,

and Maria del Carmen Gonzalez, with an introduction by

John Elderfield

This book is about figural depictions that tell stories. All of the

works illustrated—prints, drawings, paintings, posters, film stills,

photographs, and sculpture—are in the collection of The

Museum of Modern Art, New York, and most of them date from

a forty-year period, 1880 to 1920. Each expresses body language in

one form or another. The languid pose of a sleeping woman in a

photograph by Man Ray, the grimacing face of Marc Chagall in

one of his prints, the stylized pose of a nude figure in a drawing

by Egon Schiele, all send messages that are open to interpreta

tion and analysis. Lacking words, these images speak to us

through gesture, pose, and facial expression.

Published to accompany a segment of a 1999-2000 exhibition

titled ModernStarfs at The Museum of Modern Art, the book

opens with an introductory essay followed by five sections—

faces, gesture, posture, pairs, and groups—that juxtapose works

in various mediums. Among the works discussed are a photo

graph by Berenice Abbott with a print by Henri Matisse; a paint

ing by Max Beckmann with a photograph by Cindy Sherman; a

drawing by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec with a photograph by

Louise Dahl-Wolfe; a painting by Ernst Kirchner with a print by

Edvard Munch; and a painting by Edouard Vuillard and a pho

tograph by Seydou Keita. Within each section are commentaries

on two pairs of illustrations. These texts suggest possible ways of

looking at the subjects; they are also meant to encourage the

reader to look with a similar curiosity at the works that are not

discussed.

This eclectic and provocative book is both a visual treat and

an informative introduction to the many works of figural art in

the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

M4 pages; 115 illustrations, including 51 in color and 64 in duotone

BODYLANGUAGE

M. Darsie Alexander, Mary Chan, Starr Figura,

Sarah Ganz, and Maria del Carmen Gonzalez,

with an introduction by John Elderfield

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Distributed by Harry N.Abrams, Inc., New York

A strive

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ModernStorts; People, Places, Things, at The Museum

of Modern Art, New York, October 7, 1999-March

14. 2000, organized by John Elderfield, Peter Reed,

Mary Chan, and Maria del Carmen Gonzalez.

This exhibition is part of M0MA2000, which is made

possible by The Starr Foundation.

Generous support is provided by Agnes Gund and

Daniel Shapiro in memory of Louise Reinhardt Smith.

The Museum gratefully acknowledges the assistance

of the Contemporary Exhibition Fund of The Museum

of Modern Art, established with gifts from Lily

Auchincloss, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, and

Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder.

Additional funding is provided by the National

Endowment for the Arts and The Contemporary Arts

Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Produced by the Department of Publications

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Edited by Joanne Greenspun

Designed by Ed Pusz

Production by Christopher Zichello

Printed and bound by EuroGrafica SpA

This book was set in Adobe Minion, designed by

Robert Slimbach, and in FontShop Scala Sans,

by Martin Majoor. The paper is 150 gsm

Phoenix-Imperial.

Copyright ©1999 by The Museum of Modern Art,

New York

Certain illustrations are covered by claims to copy

right cited in the Photograph Credits.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Catalogue Card

Number: 99-75885

ISBN: 0-87070-026-X (MoMA)

ISBN: 0-8109-6305-5 (Abrams)

Published by The Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53 Street

New York, New York 10019

www.moma.org

Distributed in the United States and Canada

by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York

www.abramsbooks.com

Distributed outside the United States and Canada by

Thames & Hudson, Ltd, London

If XL PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

ALL NUMBERS REFERTO PACE NUMBERS.

© Artists Rights Society (ars), New York/ADACP,

Paris: 11 left, 33, 36, 63, 77, 98, 102,111,129,131,137.

© Artists Rights Society (ars), New York/Pro

Litteris, Zurich: 38.

© Artists Rights Society (ars), New York/VG

Bild-Kunst, Bonn: 34, 40, 44, 56, 139.

© Louise Bourgeois: 130.

© Estate of Fernand Ldger/Artists Rights

Society (ars), N.Y.: 58,105,127.

© Roy Lichtenstein: 31, 65.

© Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ars),

New York: ADAGP, Paris: 2, 46.

© Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights

Society(ARs), N.Y.: 19, 66, 70, 125.

© Estate ofjoan Mird/Artists Rights Society

(ars), N.Y.: 64.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. David

Allison: 113; Film Stills Archive: 59, 110; Thomas

Griesel: 30, 45, 52, 56, 83, 87, 88, 117,123,139;

Kate Keller: 8 left, 12 bottom, 19, 27, 31, 49, 53, 63,

64, 65, 70, 71, 79, 90, 104, 126,127,129,130,134,

137.138; Kate Keller/Mali Olatunji: 20, 91; Erik

Landsberg: 75; James Mathews: 23, 25,103,142;

Mali Olatunji: 9 top, 38, 44, 47, 61, 85,116; Rolf

Petersen: 33; Photography Digital Cataloguing

Project: Erik Landsberg, Kimberly Marshall

Pancoast, Kai Hecker: 8 right, 9 bottom, 11 right, 12

top, 18, 22, 24, 26, 35,46, 48, 57, 60, 62, 73, 74, 78,

82, 84, 86, 89, 97, 100, 101,108, 112,114,115,135,

140, 141,143; Adolph Studly: 34; Soichi Sunami: 36,

37. 58, 76. 105. 109, 128; John Wronn: 10 right, 21,

32, 96, 102,125,136.

© 1970 Bruce Nauman: 32.

© Nolde-Stiftung Seebiill: 23.

© Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society

(ars), N.Y.: 47, 113,126.

© Estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by vaga,

New York, N.Y.: 9 top.

© 1962 CyTwombly: 117.

Malcolm Varon: 72, 77, 124.

cover and frontispiece:

Man Ray. Sleeping Woman. 1929. Solarized

gelatin silver print, 6 '/* x 8'/2" (16.5x21.6 cm) .

The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Gift ofjames Thrall Soby

Printed in Italy

CONTENTS

6

INTRODUCTIONJohn Elderjield

14

FACESMary Chan

40

GESTUREStarr Figura

66

POSTURESarah Canz

92

PAIRSMaria del Carmen Gonzalez

118

GROUPSM. Darsie Alexander

INTRODUCTION

John Elderfield

Body language, in its popular understanding, refers to the messages that

people's bodies send out unconsciously. The earliest citation of this phenom

enon in the Oxford English Dictionary is to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

of 1606: "There's a language in her eye, her cheeks, her lip." The latest reference

there dates to 1894? when an H. Drummond wrote, "A sign Language is of no

use when one savage is at one end of a wood and his wife at the other." These

two quotations allow us to associate the language of bodily signs with visual

language in general: by nicely capturing, in the first, the immediacy of bodily

signs and, in the second, the spatial dimension commonly thought essential

to visual language. Such visual language is in contrast to the sequentiality

and the temporal dimension commonly thought to lie at the essence of verbal

language (an opposition that Leonardo da Vinci called a paragone).1

However, the Oxford English Dictionary had not heard of the term "body

language," which seems to be of modern coinage. It simply calls it "Language

t.b. Applied to methods of expressing the thoughts, feelings, wants, etc.,

otherwise than by words —and has names only for the more specialized

Finger-language (Dactylology) and the Language of Flowers.

I said that body language is popularly thought to be an unconsciously

stated language. But the dictionary reference allows that it may be conscious.

In a famous seventeenth-century account, the contrast between consciously

and unconsciously stated language was a way of distinguishing men from

animals: in Descartes's Discourse on the Method, we are told that animals differ

from men in that "they never use words, or put together other signs, as we

do in order to declare our thoughts to others," and in that they act "not

through understanding but only from the disposition of their organs ... it is

nature which acts in them."2 But even Descartes had to acknowledge the fact

that "I am not merely lodged with my body like a sailor in a ship, but am very

closely united and as it were intermingled with it."3 And in Freud s century, it

is consciously intended body language that provokes suspicion. Dactylology

may be practiced consciously, but body language is inauthentic if consciously

intended; either deceitful, if it does not acknowledge that it is conscious, or

affected, if it does. In the former instance, it is associable with politicians; in

the latter, with body builders.

This book is about neither. It is about works of art that depict the human

figure— either in part, or as a whole, or with other figures— and that express

thoughts, feelings, wants, etc., otherwise than by words. In short, it is about

figural depictions that tell stories. These figural depictions paintings,

sculptures, drawings, photographs, prints, film stills, posters are in the

collection of The Museum of Modern Art, and most of them date from a

forty-year period that begins in 1880, which is the date when, in the main,

the Museum's collection begins.4 Even with these narrative figural depictions,

however, the question of whether or not the represented body language is

consciously intended to convey legible meanings is one that continues to

make a difference. Obviously, any consciously made figural depiction will show

a consciously intended figural depiction that expresses thoughts, feelings,

wants, etc., otherwise than by words. The point, though, is whether or not

the figural depiction does that through body language or through other

means, say, through compositional or coloristic means.

Henri Matisse spoke for many modern artists when he wrote, in a now-

famous quote, in 1908: "Expression, for me, does not reside in passion burst

ing from a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire

arrangement of my picture is expressive: the place occupied by the tigures,

the empty spaces around them, the proportions, all of that has its share. 5 In

effect, he is asserting the priority to visual art of the immediacy and spatiality

commonly thought essential to all visual art over the sequentiality and

temporality commonly thought essential to all verbal art. He is opposed to

expression that is "bursting," and expression that manifests itself in violent

movement" — that is to say, temporally manifested expression, which

requires the viewer to imagine how a depicted movement fits into a sequence

of movements that is not shown. What Matisse recommends is spatially

manifested expression that can be grasped immediately, and that does not

require the viewer to imagine some invisible sequence of movements.

And yet, as the works illustrated in this volume make manifestly clear,

many modern artists continued to represent figures that do make such a

demand of the viewer, that require the viewer to infer expressive meaning

from the spatially frozen figurative representation by imagining the temporal

above, left: jos£ Clemente orozco. context to which the frozen moment belongs. Thus, the tradi-Self-Portrait. 1940. Oil and gouache on cardboard, . � , rf. ....

mounted on composition board, 2o y4 x 23 y4» tlonal means of figurative pictorial expression persisted into the

(51.4x60.3 cm). The Museum of Modem Art, modern period: through the depiction of facial expression, ofNew York. Inter-American Fund , , .

gesture and posture, and through the pairing and grouping of

above, right: Edward Weston, joseclemente figures. Represented figures spoke through the language of theOrozco. 1930. Gelatin silver print, 9 "/,6X7y,6" 1 , ,, , . , . r , . .

(24.6 x 18.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, b0Cty &S Wel1 3S thrOUgh the language of their pictorial COmpOSl-

New York. Purchase tion. Still, as the poet Geoffrey Hill puts it: "A poet's words and

rhythms are not his utterance so much as his resistance."6

Likewise, the representation of bodily eloquence provided a language for

modernist expression that was also a resistance against which modernist

expression was formed.

A simple example of this may be found in two far-from-simple portraits

of the painter Jose Clemente Orozco: one a self-portrait of 1940; the other a

photograph by Edward Weston, taken exactly a decade earlier. While clearing

from our minds any stray remnants of the prejudice that a photograph shows

a true likeness and a painting an interpretation, let us look just at the mouth.

We notice that the subject favored a certain stern haughtiness, which his own

representation of himself makes much of and which Weston allows, only to

ameliorate in the service of a kinder look. As is traditional to a figural art, we

put ourselves in the place of what is enacted; in this case, imagining what a

mouth in that shape feels like. Orozco must have felt that shape as he painted

not only his own mouth but also his collar and his forehead. Weston saw that

it might usefully be obscured a little, as well as softened, thus refusing to give

way to his subject's self-caricature.

Both the Orozco and the Weston offer readily legible images. We see in

the comparison how the language of facial expression has been manipulated,

but the language itself is fairly unambiguous. However, to look at two more

similar works — Ben Shahn's painting Man of 1946

and Dorothea Lange's photograph Migratory Cotton

Picker, Eloy, Arizona, of 1940— is to see that one of

them is extremely ambiguous. The Shahn shows a

traditional gesture of pensive thought, the hand

raised to cover the mouth, which is emphasized by

an intense gaze and a furrowed brow. But the Lange is

puzzling. The out-turned hand exposes a dry, worn

palm; this is, indeed, a worker's hand, as the title of

the photograph tells us. But the action is illegible. We

cannot tell from the frozen gesture what has either

preceded or will follow it, and without an under

standing of that temporal sequence, we cannot tell

what is happening: the man may be wiping his mouth,

or he may be sorrowful, or he may be attempting to

hide from danger or from the camera.

Some gestures are natural and anatomically

determined. Others are the products of social or

cultural conventions. In either case, figurative artists

have long followed Leonardo da Vinci's advice to

"take pleasure in carefully watching those who talk

together with gesticulating hands and get near to

listen what makes them make the particular gesture."'

(It needs saying, of course, that Leonardo was

observing Italians, and that there is a long-standing

European division between north and south when

it comes to gesture, although in the later twentieth

century the British self-definition of themselves as

peerless among the non-gesticulators did begin to

dwindle.)8 Yet, figurative artists have also long used

their observation of "talking" gestures to learn to

depict, at times, gestures whose meanings are extremely

unclear; Leonardo himself was one such artist. It may reason

ably be said, though, that ambiguous gestures appear more fre

quently in modern art. Photography, certainly, will often exploit

how a temporal sequence is suspended when the shutter falls,

and, hence, will stop and preserve a moment of a movement

that, taken alone, can be utterly obscure and captivating for that

reason.

Yet, as another comparison of a painting and a photograph

shows, the former medium, too, has found that depiction of an

ambiguously suspended moment offers the valuable pictorial

purpose of creating uncertainty in the mind of the viewer, and

top: Ben Shahn. Man. 1946. Tempera on

composition board, 22 7/sx 16 3/«" (57.9 x 41.5 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr.

and Mrs. E. Powis Jones

above: Dorothea Lance. Migratory Cotton

Picker, Eloy, Arizona. 1940. Gelatin silver print,

io 7^ x 13 72" (26.6 x 34.8 cm). The Museum of

Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer

ABOVE, left: Paul Cezanne. The Bather, c. l

Oil on canvas, 50 x 38 '/«" (127 x 96.8 cm). The

Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lillie P. Bliss

Collection

above, right: Rineke Dijkstra. Odessa, Ukraine.

4 August 1993.1993. Chromogenic color print,

46 3/s x 37" (117.8 x 94 cm). The Museum of Modern

Art, New York. Gift of Agnes Gund

therefore of maintaining and extending the viewer's engagement

with the painting. Paul Cezanne's Bather of about 1885 does

this just as much as does Rineke Dijkstra's Odessa, Ukraine. 4

August 1993.

The pose in the Cezanne goes back to a celebrated pose

from classical antiquity that made use of what the German

eighteenth-century aesthetician G. E. Lessing would describe as

the Classical moment. This required posing a figure as if in a

moment of time between one preceding and one succeeding intelligible

movement. And it relies upon our reading the entire movement from our

empathetic response to the shape of the figure, as shown. In the case of the

Cezanne, we can thus read the figure as poised between standing and taking

a step. Yet, the figure seems immovably pasted onto the surface, caught there

in unknowable thoughts, and we must scan the entire arrangement of the

picture for its expressive meaning: the place occupied by the figure, the empty

spaces around him, the proportions— all of that has its share. And it is

because the posture is a traditionally meaningful one that it offers such

meaningful resistance to the artist. Although the figure depicted in Dijkstra's

photograph is as individual and awkward as that in Cezanne's painting is

general and secure, it, too, gains a meaningful resistance from the long tradi

tion of posed figural images, as well as from the shorter, modern tradition

inaugurated by Cezanne. Certainly, it is as resistant to our understanding of

what precisely was the cause of the pose.

It is expected that we will ponder the cause; the work's invitation that

we do so is the artist's invitation that we ponder the work. When more than

one figure is represented, however, even the most negligent or most resistant

of viewers can hardly escape pondering the causal relationships in the work.

Seeing things brought together, it is natural to infer a cause.

Even without the title, Aristide Maillol's relief Desire of 1906-08 does not

offer much difficulty in this respect. The first usual interpretation of this work—

that the man desires and the woman resists the desire—will be confounded

once one begins to notice the sequence of formal analogies between their

respective postures and, especially, their mutually tangential forms. Thus, his

right leg and her right leg share a common contour, while her left leg is the

mirror of his right. And thus each of the two figures reinforces the presence of

the other, and a mutual connectiveness is described in the playfulness with

which form matches form, form contacts form, and the multiple matchings

and contacts produce multiple new forms.9 Henri Cartier-Bresson's Italy of

1933 is more difficult to read, but not necessarily more ambiguous. As with the

Dijkstra, a place is substituted in the title for the expected human description.

This invites us to wonder not only about two apparently nude figures in the

water, one wrapped around the other, laid back with arms thrown outward to

help to float, but about two presumably Italian such figures. So, remembering

something said earlier, we start to see gesticulating arms, and a con

versation, not only a seduction or a swimming lesson, in the shape.

Unquestionably, strong formal considerations underlie the

arrangement of both sets of paired bodies. Something stilled in

action in such a way as to suspend —not explain—the propulsion

of the narrative will encourage the contemplation of the shape. A

final pair of examples can demonstrate this.

below, left: Aristide Maillol. Desire. 1906-08.

Tinted plaster relief, 46 7/sx45 x 4 3/4" (H9-1 x 114-3 x

12.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Gift of the artist

below, right: Henri Cartier-Bresson. Italy.

1933. Gelatin silver print, printed 1986, 9 7/,6 x 14"

(24 x 35.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New

York. Lois and Bruce Zenkel Fund

Frances Benjamin Johnston. Stairu/ay of

Treasurer's Residence: Students at Work. 1899-1900.

From The Hampton Album. 1900. Platinum print,

7 'h x 9 '/>" (19-1 x 24.1 cm). The Museum of Modern

Art, New York. Gift of Lincoln Kirstein

Oskar Schlemmer. Bauhaus Stairway. 1932. Oil

on canvas, 63 7/s x 45" (162.3 x 114.3 cm)- The Museum

of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson

Both Frances Benjamin Johnston's Stairway of Treasurer's Residence:

Students at Work of 1899-1900 and Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus Stairway of

1932 clearly show stilled actions. Part of the wonder of both works is that it is

as if time suddenly has stopped in them, and has stopped forever, so that

these Figures will never move again. These figures will, indeed, forever be

shapes on staircases. And yet, especially when a number of figures are shown,

it is natural to imagine a narrative. In the case of the Johnston, one imagines

the efficiency of the hammering and the building, and that it is as repetitively

organized and beautifully executed as this photograph is. And, in the case of

the Schlemmer, one imagines the kind of painting the members of the Bauhaus

will make when they get to the top of the staircase, and concludes

that it will look like this painting. Thus, these images resemble

the narratives that they call up. Of course, it is the architectural as

well as bodily language represented in them that contributes to

this effect. Yet, the body language of Johnston's and Schlemmer's

figures tells us that they are the sort of people who would make

the sort of things we are looking at. They are stand-ins for their

artists, busily making things or busily rushing to work.

The retentive reader will have noticed that the five pairs of

examples I have briefly discussed correspond to the five channels

of bodily eloquence mentioned earlier, namely, facial expression,

gesture, posture, pairs, and groups. This five-part division pro

duced the organizing principle of this book. The works illustrated

in the pages that follow are, therefore, divided into five sections

devoted to these subjects, with ten pairs of illustrations in each.

Two pairs of illustrations in each section have commentaries by

the person who chose the illustrations for that section. Their aim

is to suggest possible ways of looking at the subjects of these

commentaries, and to encourage the reader to look with a similar

curiosity at the other works.

The attentive reader will have noticed that my five pairs of

examples all compare paintings (or a sculpture) with pho

tographs. This is not typical of the pairs of images that follow,

but it has served the purpose, I hope, of asserting that similar

issues attend the painterly manufacture and the photographic

record of the language of the body; that both partake of the

same tradition; that both resist it, albeit in different ways. In

both, certainly, we are regularly faced with the so-called iconic

defeat that modern art imposes upon its viewers, as we puzzle at

what the body language actually means. And, puzzling, we soon

learn that the not-so-hidden message of the language, in addition

to its narrative description, is to keep us reading otherwise than

bywords.

1. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text,

Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1986).

2. Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings

of Descartes, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Eng.:

Cambridge University Press, 1985),

pp. 140-41-

3. Rene Descartes, Meditations and Other

Metaphysical Writings, translated with an

introduction by Desmond M. Clarke

(London: Penguin, 1998).

4. Thus, the present publication is intended

to complement the People section of

ModernStorts: People, Places, Things (New

York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999),

which offers further examples and discussion

of body language. My introduction to that

section, "Representing People: The Story and

the Sensation," is complementary in some

respects to this present Introduction.

5. Dominique Fourcade, ed., Henri Matisse: fcrits

etpropos sur I'art, rev. ed. (Paris: Hermann,

1992), p. 42.

6. Geoffrey Hill, The Enemy's Country: Words,

Contexture, and Other Circumstances of

Language (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University

Press, 1995).

7. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting

(fol. 25), ed. A. P. McMahon (Princeton, N. J.:

Princeton University Press, 1956).

8. See Keith Thomas, "Introduction," in Jan

Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, A

Cultural History of Gesture (Ithaca, N.Y.:

Cornell University Press), pp. 9-10. This

useful book has an excellent bibliography.

9. Cf. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The

Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art

and Modern Culture (New York: Schocken,

1985), p. 20, and passim for discussion of

visual narrative and its vicissitudes.

FACES

Berenice Abbott

Portrait of the Artist (detail; see p. 18). c. 1950.

Berenice Ab bott, Portrait of the Artist

Henri Matisse, White Mask on Black Background

Berenice Abbott's photograph Portrait of the Artist and Henri Matisse's

aquatint White Mask on Black Background exhibit striking formal similarities

(pp. 18-19). Both are close-up images of slightly angled faces with assymetrically

Mary Chan positioned eyes, long, straight noses, and dark upturned lips. These black-and-

white compositions manipulate the technical possibilities of their respective

mediums to abstract the human facial features to different ends. A comparison

of the two invites an exploration of the notion of the mask —whether it is

directly portrayed or suggested through pictorial illusion.

Among all the fine arts, photography is best suited to render natural

appearances faithfully, particularly in portraiture. In this case, Abbott uses the

camera to distort her own self-image. She dramatically skews the proportions

of her face, which is dominated by the misshapen eyes—the sharp diagonal of

the left eye leading our attention down toward her exaggeratedly tapered chin.

Her head is propped up on her folded hand, its narrow fingers blending into

the wavy pattern of her clothing. This stylized fracturing of form, while remi

niscent of Cubist works, readily suggests the influence of Man Ray's Surrealist

innovations and fashion photography. Indeed, Abbott worked as an assistant to

Man Ray in Paris from 1923 to 1923. The avant-garde photographer hired her

because of her ignorance of photography, feeling that she could be easily

trained; yet within two years Abbott had fostered her own portraiture clien

tele, eventually establishing her own studio in 1926. She made her reputation

from straightforward photographs that capture the essence of the personalities

of the artistic and literary figures of Paris. In this remarkable self-portrait,

however, Abbott abandons her signature restrained style.

The photograph most likely belongs to a group of self-portraits created

by Abbott beginning in the 1940s, by which time she had returned to New York.

During this period, American photography embraced a visual experimentation

indicative of stylistic advances occurring in the visual arts in general. Frustrated

by existing photographic equipment, Abbott founded a company called the

House of Photography, where she developed ideas for new processes. One

apparatus, the distortion easel, allowed for the doctoring of the surface of

prints while they were being developed in the darkroom, resulting in extreme

images, such as Portrait of the Artist. Although she received a patent for the

distortion easel in the early 1950s, it—like her other inventions —failed to sell.1

What may one construe from this decomposition of the self-portrait by an

artist who extolled the virtues of realism in photography?2 The deliberate

transformation of her face may be analyzed in terms of a kind of masking since

it bars a true reading of her bearing or physical characteristics. In this sense,

the feeling of disjunction and flux suggests a non-fixed identity removed from

conventional boundaries of feminine depiction. Thus in this experimentation

with her own image, a course she seems not to have usually taken with her

portraits of others, we are tempted to locate the personal within an ostensibly

formal investigation.

The disembodied, stark white face set against the dense, subtly lined black

background in the Matisse print has been described as analogous to an image

of the moon floating in the night sky. It is the last in a series of aquatint heads

composed of heavily applied black lines on white paper, all exemplifying the

simplicity of line employed by the artist to delineate the features of the human

face. Whereas a degree of the individuality of his subjects was retained in the

preceding aquatint heads, here, in the image of a mask, Matisse has created a

powerful emblem of a face.

Matisse returned to the mask in numerous cutouts, prints, and drawings

during the late 1940s to early 1950s. These include the cutouts The Eskimo

(1947), Negro Mask (1950), and Japanese Mask (1950); lithographs of Eskimos

(1949) illustrating a novel by Georges Duthuit about an imaginary Arctic trip;

and brush and ink drawings similar to the faces executed in charcoal on his

bedroom ceiling. In the context of these other works, Matisse may also have

intended this particular mask to bear connotations of the foreign, with atten

dant implications of the exotic and primitive. Yet in contrast to those based on

specific cultural artifacts, this mask, with its rudimentary features, imparts a

certain disquietude. Earlier in his career, Matisse conferred abstracted, masklike

faces upon several of his portrait subjects of the 1910s, thus erecting a barrier

that obstructs communication with the viewer. Now, near the end of his life, he

further abstracts the face, eliminating any external context and so projecting a

stronger feeling of remoteness.

There is something unsettling about both the Abbott and the Matisse

images. Although Abbott was never associated with Surrealism, the disorienta

tion that she conjures in her photograph corresponds to the inclination toward

the hallucinatory and subjective typical of that aesthetic movement. Because it

is a self-portrait, these elements encourage one to look beyond the purely for

mal in search of clues to the articulation of her identity as an artist and as an

independent woman. Matisse, on the other hand, exploits the forceful resonance

of black and white to produce a generalized likeness of a face, converting

universal facial characteristics into an object meant to disguise or alter identity.

In these extraordinary examples of modern renderings of the same motif, we

are thus confronted with the expressive potential and ultimate mystery inherent

in the human face.

FACES I 17

1. The distortion easel is reproduced in Hank

O'Neal, Berenice Abbott: Sixty Years of Photog

raphy (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982),

p. 25.

2. Berenice Abbott, A Guide to Better

Photography (New York: Crown, 1941).

Berenice Abbott

Portrait of the Artist, c. 1950.

Gelatin silver print, 12'3/i6X io'/s" (32.5 x 25.7 cm).


Frances Keech Fund in honor of Monroe Wheeler

I 19

Henri Matisse

White Mask on Black Background. 1949-50,

printed 1966.

Aquatint, plate: i2'/2 x 9yA" (V-7 * 24.8 cm).

Edition: 25. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Purchased with funds given by Harry Kahn, Susan

and Arthur L. Fleischer, Jr., Carol and Bert Freidus,

Johanna and Leslie). Garfield, Linda and Bill Goldstein,

Francine E. Lembo, Barbara and Max Pine, and Susan

and Peter A. Ralston in honor of Riva Castleman

20

mi

im iU ml t k

Mwm t 'mm '*j

Mkirn JpJJQj 981 i£1$ r. < fcfKJi I $ $1

\mw c. ' -' IB " f:iK . p,,. ^

CUSTAV KLI MT

Woman in Profile. 1898-99.

Colored pencil on paper, i67/s x 113/s" (42.8 x 28.7 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Joan and

Lester Avnet Collection

Edvard Munch

Nude Figure (Sin), c. 1902.

Lithograph, comp.: 273/s x 15'3/16" (69-5 x 40-2 cm).

Printer: Lassally, Berlin. Edition: more than 100.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of

James Thrall Soby

Richard Avedon

Ezra Pound, poet, Rutherford, New Jersey. June 30, 1958.

Gelatin silver print, i65/s x 13V4" (42.2 x 35 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the

photographer. ©1958 Richard Avedon

I 23

%u( AUdt.

Emil Nolde

Prophet. 1912

Woodcut, comp.: i2s/s x 83/4M (32.1 x 22.2 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given

anonymously (by exchange)

Edward Steich en

Sunburn, c. 1925.

Gelatin silver print, printed later, 135/8 x io3/4"

(34.6 x 27.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,

New York. Gift of the photographer

25

John D. Graham

Study after Celia. 1944-45.

Pencil on tracing paper, 227/sx 18Y4" (58.2 x


The Joan and Lester Avnet Collection

Edward Steichen

Gloria Swan son. 1924.

Gelatin silver print, printed later, 16716x1372" (42.1 x


Gift of the photographer

I 27

wSLluiliMiBM

Artist unknown

Victor Cycles. 1898.

Lithograph, 28 x 195/s" (72.4 x 49.9 cm) .


The Lauder Foundation

Max Klinger, Going Under

Roy Lichtenstei n, Drowning Girl

Separated in date by more than seventy-five years, Max Klinger 's Going Under

of 1884 and Roy Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl of 1963 are images of women

submerged in water, both victims of doomed love (pp. 30-31). Whereas Going

Mary Chan Under is part of an allegorical cycle of etchings tracing a woman's downfall to

prostitution and ruin, and Drowning Girl is one of many canvases of women

based on comic-book characters, their extreme differences in artistic intent

correspond to a shared social critique, the former of late-nineteenth-century

bourgeois moral hypocrisy and the latter of early 1960s female stereotypes.

In Klinger 's etching, the woman's face seems just on the verge of sinking

below the surface of the water. With her head tilted slightly back, water begins

to seep into her open mouth, and her wide eyes simultaneously express fear

and resignation. Framing the small head and reflecting the anguish of its

expression, the dark ripples of water and the overcast night sky dominate the

composition. The ominous physical presence of these natural elements is

graphically accentuated by the nervously flowing lines of the moving water

coupled with the thin cross-hatchings of the near-black horizon. Untergang,

the original German title of this print, and its English translation, are an

obvious literal reference to the scene depicted but also a symbolic allusion to

the social undoing narrated in the entire cycle, called A Life. In fifteen plates,

Klinger presents the story of a woman seduced and deserted by her lover,

forced to support herself as a prostitute, ostracized by both the lower and

upper tiers of society, driven to suicide, and finally delivered to a cold, unfor

giving afterlife. Water plays a role in two other prints from the series: the lovers

are imagined intertwined beneath the sea and, after her abandonment, the

woman stands staring into the vast ocean —a familiar motif in German

Romantic art.

Klinger produced a number of print series, all incorporating the devices of

exaggeration and fantasy, which the artist felt could better communicate his

personal outlook on life as opposed to the mediums of painting and sculpture.

In A Life, supposedly based on newspaper accounts,1 he sought to blend a

dreamlike chronicle with a harshly realistic commentary on women's plight in

society. The fallen woman was a common nineteenth-century preoccupation

because of the belief that a woman's innate instability coupled with the temp

tation of her sexuality could contribute to her downfall. Klinger's fixation with

the concepts of love, sex, and death is indicative of the changing social mores of

the time. Additionally, his expression of their manifestations upon the human

psyche and the infusion of his works with a lingering sense of foreboding align

him with the Symbolist movement.

FACES

Lichtenstein's painting zeroes in on the face of the drowning girl, encircling

it with crashing waves. The balloon at the top revealing her thoughts immedi

ately sets the ironic tone for the work, as the drama of the event is mitigated

by the silliness of her reaction. This composition derives from one frame in a

romance comic book showing a girl in the foreground with her boyfriend

looking on from a capsized boat. By reducing the narrative context,

Lichtenstein takes the comic-strip genre one step further from reality until we

are confronted only with the iconic image of the crying girl: her tears, facsimiles

of the white waves, do not spoil the mascara on her full eyelashes. The enlarged

scale of the Benday dots and the cartoon patterns of curves for the hair and

water, the heavy black outlines, and the blue color of the perfectly coiffed hair

heighten the sense of the absurd. Lichtenstein remarked upon his conscious

effort to approximate the waves in nineteenth-century Japanese woodcuts by

Hokusai. "The original wasn't very clear in this regard— why should it be? I saw

it and pushed it a little further until it was a reference that most people would

get . . . it is a way of crystallizing the style by exaggeration." 2

By reinforcing the artificiality of their representation, Lichtenstein empha

sizes the idea of women as weak and emotional, conventional assumptions

perpetuated in the mass media of the 1960s. Drowning Girl is one of numerous

paintings from 1963—65 with female protagonists who are desperate, passive play

ers in their relationships with men. His sophisticated take on the American cliche

of femininity during a time when the women's movement had not yet assumed

force signals one facet of Pop art's cynical attitude toward the postwar mindset.

From these two faces of desperate women, the viewer may infer two very

different stories and two kinds of judgment on the part of their male creators.

Klinger's work, based on a tradition of illustrated morality tales, requires

knowledge of the entire sequence of etchings in order to convey its angst-

ridden message. This heavy-handed picturing of death in a metaphorical ocean

of suffering is meant to elicit sympathy. Meanwhile, Lichtenstein s deadpan

rendering of the drowning girl denies any emotional connection. Its humorous

appropriation of popular imagery stems from the fundamental aim to provide

a picture of consumer society within the realm of high art, but may also be

read as a pointed commentary on contemporaneous estimations of women s

vulnerability. Thus, on one hand, woman is martyred by the fault of society at

large while, on the other, woman is done in by her own shallowness, a trait

underscored in the wider culture that she represents, the very culture that

invented her as a type.1. Memory Jockisch Holloway, Max Klinger:

Love, Death and the Beyond (Melbourne:

National Gallery of Victoria, 1981), p. 2.

2. Quoted in John Coplans, "Talking with Roy

Lichtenstein," originally published in Artforum,

no. 9 (May 1967); reprinted in John Coplans,

ed. Roy Lichtenstein (New York: Praeger

Publishers, 1972), p. 91.

29

Max Klinger

Going Under (Untergang), plate 3 from A Life

(Ein Leben). 1884.

Etching and aquatint, plate: n'/i6X 95/i6" (28.2 x


Mrs. john D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund

I 3i

Roy Lichtenstein

Drowning Cirl. 1963.

Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 675/s x

66V4" 071-6 x 169.5 cm)- The Museum of Modern

Art, New York. Philip Johnson Fund and gift of Mr.

and Mrs. Bagley Wright

I DON'T CARE/I'D RATHERTHAN CALL BRAD

FOR HELP / r

Bruce Nau man

Study for Hologram from the series Studies for

Holograms. 1970.

Screenprint, comp: 20s/i6 x 26'/i6" (51.6 x 66.2 cm).

Publishers: Castelli Graphics, New York. Printer:

Aetna Studios, New York. Edition: 150. The Museum

of Modern Art, New York. John B. Turner Fund

I 33

Jean Dubuffet

Rene Bertele. 1947.

Reed pen and ink on paper, i3'/4 x 95/8" (33-5 x


Gift of Heinz Berggruen, William S. Lieberman, and

Klaus Perls in memory of Frank Perls, art dealer

34 I

i. »f i

Paul Klee

Menacing Head (Drohendes Haupt). 1905.

Etching, plate: 7"/i6 x 53/4" (19.6 x 14.6 cm).

Printer: Max Ciraret, Bern. Edition: 10.


Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund

Guillaume-Ben)amin-Amand Duchenne de

Boulogne

Fright (Effroi) from Mecanisme de la physionomie

humaine. 1862.

Albumen silver print from a wet-collodion glass

negative, 43/4 x 3"/i6" (12.2 x 9.4 cm). The Museum

of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Paul F. Walter

36

Marc Chagall

Self-Portrait with Grimace (Selbstbildnis mit

Grimasse). c. 1924-25.

Etching and aquatint, plate: i4"/i6 x 101/4" (37-3 x

27.4 cm). Printer: Louis Fort, Paris. Edition: 100.


artist

I 37

Emile-Antoine Bourdelle

Beethoven, Tragic Mask. 1901.

Bronze, 3072 x 17 x 1774" (77-4 * 43-2 x 45 cm)-


Grace Rainey Rogers Fund

Graham Sutherland

Thorn Head. 1945.

Gouache, chalk, and ink on paper mounted on

board, 217/s x 207/s" (55.4 x 53 cm). The Museum of

Modern Art, New York. James Thrall Soby Bequest

David Alfaro Siqueiros

Echo of a Scream. 1937.

Enamel on wood, 48 x 36" (121.9 x 91.4 cm).


Edward M. M. Warburg

GESTURE

Max Beckman n

Self-Portrait with a Cigarette (detail; see p. 44). 1923.

Max Beckman n, Self-Portrait with a Cigarette

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #713

Smoking is an activity that has long been associated with particular social

types, from the urbane sophisticate to the jaded individualist. Max Beckmann's

Self-Portrait with a Cigarette and Cindy Sherman's Untitled #113 are self-portraits

Starr Figura (although the latter is not so in a traditional sense) that exploit these associations

to convey subtle social and psychological truths (pp. 44-45). They also use self-

portraiture as a means of probing unconscious assumptions about reality and

representation. As Beckmann stated, "What I want to show in my work is the

idea that hides itself behind so-called reality. . . . Like the famous kabbalist who

once said: 'If you wish to get hold of the invisible you must penetrate as deeply

as possible into the visible.'"1

Beckmann created more than eighty self-portraits in paintings, prints, and

drawings. In the early 1920s, when this work was painted, he was readjusting to

middle-class life and reestablishing himself as a successful artist after having lived

through the confusion and shock of the immediate post-World War I years. The

violence and inhumanity of the war had permanently shaken his faith in the

values of society and culture. 2 But while his self-portraits from the 1910s often

reveal a vulnerable side, here Beckmann's stern, unflinching visage and hard,

rectangular form indicate that he now views himself in almost heroic terms, and

he plays with the disguise of absolute power. His dapper clothing connotes pros

perity and control; his masklike face is inscrutable, even sinister; and his stare is

so penetrating that it seems to somehow implicate the viewer. His right arm,

holding the cigarette, is raised in a gesture that signals confrontation and defiance

as much as it does smoking. By presenting himself against a gold background

reminiscent of medieval icons, he subliminally implies his own saintliness or

martyrdom. Although Beckmann continues to view the world in tragic terms, he

is not a victim but an all-seeing and unforgiving judge.

Sixty years later, Sherman cast herself in a different, yet curiously parallel,

role, that of the mysteriously aloof but vulnerable tough girl, a romantic stereo

type familiar to audiences of film and television. One of several artists working

in the 1980s and 1990s who use their own bodies as subject matter, Sherman

has photographed herself in guises that subvert the ways in which women are

typically portrayed in the media. In her groundbreaking series from 1977-80

called Untitled Film Stills, she assumed a variety of personas reminiscent of

cinematic heroines from the 1950s and 1960s.

Untitled #113 is from a period in the early 1980s when Sherman began

working in color and in larger, near-life-size dimensions. In it, she uses gesture

in combination with makeup, clothing, lighting, and setting to create a specific

emotional moment. The scene is intimate and personal, with curtains in the

background suggesting a behind-the-scenes stage break. The subject's clothes and

hair look cheap and artificial, and her relaxed posture implies resignation and

weariness. Her head is cocked to one side, and she glances up as if she has just

been interrupted from reverie. But despite the intimation of privacy, her pose is

mannered and self-conscious, for Sherman is projecting a persona rather than

truly relaxing. By using photography —the medium through which this kind

of stereotype has been glamourized and popularized —Sherman exploits and

confounds our expectations of a "real" or truthful moment and thus reinforces

the ambiguous sense of deja vu that we experience in viewing her work.

Beckmann's painting reflects a similar fascination with theatrics and role-

playing. In portraits and allegorical scenes from the postwar period on, he

repeatedly represented himself in costumes of the circus, the cabaret, and other

popular entertainments. The red polka-dot sash at the lower left is a sly reference

to the attire of a clown, a motif which for Beckmann symbolized the tragicomic

nature of humanity. Its presence adds an element of ambiguity to this otherwise

authoritarian self-representation and reflects Beckmann's apprehension that

there may be only a fine line between a serious artist and a charlatan.

For both artists, the use of disguise in conjunction with self-portraiture

reveals a paradoxical compulsion toward both exhibitionism and concealment.

The viewer's role is thus transferred from simple spectator to voyeur. In

Beckmann's painting, it is as if we have opened a door or a curtain, represented

by a black band along the right edge of the canvas, in order to expose the artist.

A harsh light floods the space, accentuating his hard form and unyielding

personality. In contrast, Sherman's figure is nearly eclipsed by a soft, dark

ambiance. The dramatic illumination, borrowed from Baroque painting,

infiltrates her private space and, highlighting only a few areas of her body, her

face, and her bleached hair, offsets the mannerism of her pose. While

Beckmann's reaction to our intrusion is rigid and confrontational, Sherman

has seemingly been caught unaware, and she remains vulnerable.

Beckmann's life and art were ineluctably shaped by his being a German

during the first half of the twentieth century; Sherman's are inextricably bound

by her being a woman in the second half. As she has said, "Everything in [my

work] was drawn from my observations as a woman in this culture.

And part of that is a love-hate thing—being infatuated with make

up and glamour and detesting it at the same time. It comes from

trying to look like a proper young lady or look as sexy or as beau

tiful as you can make yourself, and also feeling like a prisoner of

that structure."3 The leitmotif of disguise and masking that per

meates the work of these two artists is a reflection of this distrust

for appearances and the sense of freedom denied. Imprisoned

within their metaphorically tight, boxlike spaces, these figures

respond to the social and psychological restrictions that have

shaped them with gestures of sardonic disillusionment.

GESTURE 43

1. Max Beckmann, "On My Painting," lecture

delivered in London, July 21,1938, translated

in Max Beckmann Self-Portrait in Words:

Collected Writings and Statements , 1903-1950

(Chicago and London: University of Chicago

Press, 1997), p. 302.

2. Beckmann volunteered for the German army

medical corps in 1914. By July 1915 his idealistic

attitude toward the war had changed, and he

suffered a nervous collapse and was discharged

from military service.

3. Cindy Sherman, interviewed by Noriko

Fuku, "A Woman of Parts," Art in America 85,

no. 6 (June 1997): 80.

Max Beckman n

Self-Portrait with a Cigarette. 1923.

Oil on canvas, 23 x i57/s" (60.2 x 40.3 cm).


Gift of Dr. and Mrs. F. H. Hirschland

Cindy Sherman

Untitled #113.1982.

Chromogenic color print, 44s/i6 x 29'/!" (112.5 x


Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser

Man Ray

Sleeping Woman. 1929.

Solarized gelatin silver print, 6 '/a x 872" (16.5 x


Gift of James Thrall Soby

Pablo Picasso

Repose. 1908.

Oil on canvas, 32 x 25Y4" (81.2 x 65.4 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired

by exchange through the Katherine S. Dreier Bequest

and the Hillman Periodicals, Philip Johnson, Miss

Janice Loeb, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Mr. and

Mrs. Norbert Schimmel Funds

Richard Avedon

Dovima with Elephants, Evening Dress by Dior,

Cirque d'Hiver, Paris. August 1955.

Gelatin silver print, i9'/i6 x I5's/i6" (48.4 x 38.2 cm).


photographer. ©1955 Richard Avedon

<e>id95

JANEAvril

I 49

Ii

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Jane Avril. 1899.

Lithograph, comp.: 22'/i6 x 14716" (56 x 35.7 cm).

Publisher: Jane Avril. Printer: H. Stern, Paris. Signed

edition: 25. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Gift of Abby Aid rich Rockefeller

W. K.-L. Dickson

Sandow. 1894.

35mm, black and white, silent, 30 seconds

(approx.). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village,

Dearborn, Michigan (by exchange)

Econ Schiele

Nude with Arm Raised. 1910.

Watercolor and charcoal on paper, 17'/* x 1274"


New York. Gift of Ronald S. Lauder

52

John Steuart Curry

John Brown. 1939, published 1940.

Lithograph, comp.: i43/s x io'/i6" (36.6 x 25.6 cm).

Publisher: Associated American Artists, New York.

Printer: George Miller, New York. Edition: 250.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Abby

Aldrich Rockefeller Fund (by exchange)

Arnulf Rainer

Self-Portrait, c.1975.

Photogravure with etching and drypoint, plate:

11 '/i6x 12'/ 2" (28.1 X3i.7cm). Printer: KurtZein,

Vienna. Edition: unknown. The Museum of Modern

Art, New York. Larry Aldrich Fund

Kathe Kollwitz, Help Russia

Dorothea Lang e, Just About to Step into the Bus for the Assembly

Center , San Francisco

Kathe Kollwitz's Help Russia and Dorothea Lange's Just About to Step into the

Bus for the Assembly Center, San Francisco were created by artists working at

different times and in separate places, using particular mediums under distinct

Starr Figura circumstances (pp. 56-57). Yet these works share certain essential characteristics,

most notably the motif of hands surrounding a central figure to dramatically

illustrate that figure's helplessness or persecution.

Kollwitz, who lived through a period of great social and economic upheaval

in Germany, including two World Wars, had an overriding compassion for the

poor and the powerless, and she devoted her art and her life to moral and social

betterment. Help Russia was produced in response to a drought in the Volga

Basin that led to widespread famine in the then-struggling new nation of the

Soviet Union.1 It was one of several lithographic posters that Kollwitz made

during the years following the end of World War I to draw attention to the

victims of postwar political and economic instability. Copies of the print were

offered all over Germany, and the funds collected from their sale were used for

the relief efforts in Russia. In 1922 Kollwitz wrote, "I am content that my work

should have purposes outside itself. I would like to exert influence in these

times when human beings are so perplexed and in need of help."2

Lange was also a passionate idealist who strove in her work to ameliorate

the social turmoil in the United States caused by the Great Depression and

World War II. She is most famous for her photographs for the Farm Security

Administration (fsa), which was established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt

in 1935 to educate the public about the severe effects of the Depression and to

demonstrate the steps the government was taking to alleviate poverty and suffer

ing. Just About to Step into the Bus is from a slightly later series, when Lange was

working for the War Relocation Authority (wra), another New Deal era

agency. Instituted in March 1942, shortly after the 1941 bombing of Pearl

Harbor, the wra oversaw the internment, or "relocation," of some 110,000

Japanese-Americans, most of them living on the West Coast. Like the fsa, the

wra viewed photography as a means of disseminating favorable images of its

activities to the public. Both agencies made Lange's photographs widely available

for reproduction in newspapers and magazines.

Most of Lange's wra photographs, including this one, depict Japanese-

Americans on the eve of their incarceration. They reveal the process by which

innocent citizens were rounded up and sent to holding pens, called "assembly

centers." Lange recognized the inhumanity in this, and she used her pho

tographs to subtly convey her disapproval. Her works show Japanese-

Americans, many of whom were immigrants or first-generation Americans, as

people who had achieved a measure of success through their hard work and

perseverance and who maintained dignity in the face of injustice and humiliation.

As women artists concerned with the social and political issues of their

times, Kollwitz and Lange utilized two mediums that are often, perhaps

unfairly, considered the minor arts: printmaking and photography. Both are

reproductive mediums, meaning that the plate or negative can be printed more

than once to produce multiple copies of an image that can then be widely dis

seminated. This populist approach to subject matter and medium also extended

to the style of their imagery. While many of Kollwitz's peers, especially the

German Expressionists, were experimenting with formal innovations, her own

style remained conservative and dependent on the kind of resolute realism

and bold, graphic expression that could most easily be understood by a mass

audience. Lange's earnest images came to be identified with the term "docu

mentary photography" —photography that is not self-consciously artistic but is

instead a tool of social advocacy marked by a style that is meant to look ingenuous

and authentic.

Both pictures rely on the representation of gesture to put forward a pleading

or pointed commentary on the human condition. Yet this representation is

somewhat unusual because the most significant action is expressed not by the

central figure, but, rather, by anonymous hands projecting toward this figure

from outside the picture frame. It may not be initially obvious which set of

hands is meant to support and which to oppress —the hands in the Kollwitz

print appear rough and uninviting, while the intruding hands in Lange s

photograph look soft and gentle. But there are other pictorial references and

details that help to clarify the messages in these works. For example, Kollwitz

presents us with an emaciated figure whose slumped, defeated posture and

agonized, half-dead expression recall representations of the suffering and death

of Christ. The surrounding hands may invoke those of Christ's followers

removing him from the cross.

The telling details that help place Lange's photograph within the historical

moment it represents include: a crowd of other detainees waiting anxiously

behind the central character; what appears to be an official form at the lower

left; and, attached to the central figure's lapel, an identification tag that serves to

dehumanize and humiliate him. Like Kollwitz, Lange uses her protagonist's

body language to expressive and symbolic effect. His downcast eyes and passive

demeanor suggest submission. The offending hands, detached from individual

identity, approach and touch him with a sense of entitlement that

is inappropriately proprietary. These anonymous hands, belonging

at once to no one and to everyone, suggest a pattern of mass

blame and a lack of individual accountability that Lange means to

criticize. Kollwitz and Lange fervently and eloquently remind us

that it is our actions, the gestures we make as individuals, that

define us as a society.

GESTURE I 55

1. On the first state of the print, the words

"Helff Russland" appeared across the top.

For the second and third states, the text was

removed.

2. Kathe Kollwitz diary entry, November 1922,

translated in Hans Kollwitz, ed., The Diary

and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz (Evanston, 111.:

Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 104.

56 |

Kath e Kollwitz

Help Russia (Helft Russland). 1921.

Lithograph, comp.: i6'/8X i8"/i6" (41 x 47.5 cm).

Publisher: Komitefiir Arbeiterhilfe, Berlin. Printer:

Hermann Birkenholz, Berlin. Edition, third state: 300.

The Museum of Modem Art, New York. The Ralph E.

Shikes Fund

Dorothea Lance

Just About to Step into the Bus for the Assembly

Center, San Francisco. 1942.

Gelatin silver print, printed later, g'/j x g3/s"


New York. Purchase

Fernan d L£ger

Face and Hands. 1952.

Brush and ink, and pencil on paper, 26 x 1974'

(66 x 50.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,

New York. Mrs. Wendell T. Bush Fund

Luis Bunuel

Un Chien andalou 1928.

35mm, black and white, silent, 17 minutes (approx.).


the artist

Martin Munkacsi

Vacation Fun. 1929.

Gelatin silver print, 137.6 x 1074" (33.7 x 27.3 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased

as the gift of Lois and Bruce Zenkel

Custav Klucis

Fulfilled Plan, Great Work. 1930.

Gravure, 46 J/4 x 33'/V (118.8 x 84.4 cm).


Purchase Fund, Jan Tschichold Collection

Lewis W. Hine

Steamfitter. 1920.

Gelatin silver print, g5/s x 6'5/i6" (24.4 x 17.6 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase

JGArVCARL ts

Jean Carlu

America's Answer— Production. 1942.

Offset lithograph, 2g7/s x 3gs/s" (75.9 x 100.7 cm).


Office for Emergency Management

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Joan M i r6

He/p Spain (Aidez I'Espagne). 1937.

Pochoir, comp.: 93/4 x 75/s" (24.8 x 19.4 cm).

Publisher: Editions Cahiers d'Art, Paris. Printer:

Moderne Imprimerie, Paris. The Museum of

Modern Art, New York. Gift of Pierre Matisse

Wssmm:-::v:vv:v:fl0fc;

Roy Lichtenstein

Sweet Dreams, Baby! from the portfolio 11 Pop

Artists, volume III. 1965, published 1966.

Screenprint, comp.: 35s/s x 259/i6" (90.5 x 64.9 cm).

Publisher: Original Editions, New York. Printer:

Knickerbocker Machine and Foundry Inc., New York.


Gift of Original Editions

POSTURE

Henri Matisse

Bather (detail; see p. 70). 1909.

Henri Matisse, Bather

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

The posture of a depicted body enlivens an image in its ability to communicate

narrative, disposition, and progression of time. Body posture intimates a world

beyond and outside the frame of a stilled image while also potentially revealing

Sarah Ganz the subject's character and inner state of being. Posture lends expression or

speech to a form of art which otherwise, as Ernst Gombrich stated, is "only

lacking voice . . . embodying everything of real life except speech." 1

In Henri Matisse's Bather of 1909 (p. 70), the solid pink figure inscribed

by bold black contours fills the picture, its torso bent forward as it wades

through the water away from the viewer. Executed in preparation for Sergei

Shchukin's commission of large decorative panels for the staircase of his

Moscow home, Bather was probably rendered from memory rather than from

life and is generally based on a figure in Paul Cezanne's Three Bathers, of about

1879-82, which Matisse owned. The ambiguity of the figure's gender—its short

hair, stocky body, and fleshy uncertain appendage, which may be a concealed

breast—recalls Cezanne's Bathers. This reference is accentuated by the abstract

space in which the figure is situated: a uniform blue field interrupted only by

the suggestion of rippling and splashing turquoise water. The nude body is

rendered so economically —its legs truncated by the canvas edge, its arms

redrawn and shifting, placed in an indeterminate space that is equally the

water's surface and a vertical backdrop of blue—that, as a result, all we are left

with to decipher the image is the posture of the body itself.

Matisse, through his reading of the aesthetician and philosopher Henri

Bergson, was deeply interested in the question of how time could be represented

in painting and the manner in which time intersected with the space of the

painting. Matisse's Bather maybe read as an illustration of Bergsonian notions:

"Discontinuous though they may appear [separated temporal incidents] stand

out against the continuity of a background on which they are designed, and to

which they owe the intervals that separate them." 2 In the articulation of move

ment through pose and multiple contours, we are given a sense of the duration

of time, a progression of successive moments. Represented in the process of

transition from one pose to another, the body functions as a vehicle of experi

ence and insight rather than solely as an object of contemplation. Bergson

heralded the body as the center of perception: "As my body moves in space, all

the other images vary, while that image, my body remains invariable. I must

therefore, make it a center, to which I refer all the other images . . . My body is

that which stands out at the center of these perceptions."3 Similarly, Matisse

emphasized the body as a means through which essential qualities can be

perceived, as he stated in 1908: "What interests me most is neither still life nor

landscape, but the human figure. ... I do not insist upon all the details of the

face . . . I . . . discover his essential qualities ... A work of art must carry within

itself its complete significance and impose that upon the beholder even before

he recognizes the subject matter."4 Matisse's Bather achieves just this —the

significance of the body is understood through its posture, which one reads

before discerning context and subject matter.

It is the posture of Matisse's Bather, bent forward with weighted strides,

that allows us to read the abstract environment as water. With Umberto

Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of 1913 (p. 71) body and environ

ment interpenetrate. The figure steps forth, its center of gravity thrust forward,

while contours of flesh are shaped by and dissolve into the air through which

the body moves. Boccioni called for a sculpture of environment in his "Technical

Manifesto of Futurist Painting" of 1910, staling that "the gesture which we would

reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It

shall be the dynamic sensation itself.. . . We therefore cast aside and proclaim the

absolute and complete abolition of definite lines and closed sculpture. We break

open the figure and enclose it in environment."5 The confluence of metal, flesh,

and air presents a figure at once ensconced in fluttering flames and weighted

down by the heavy blocks on which it stands as well as the apparent effort

required to penetrate the space through which it moves.

The voice of Bergson permeates Boccioni's ideas and those of the Futurist

manifestos; the application of philosophical inquiry to the body particularly

attracted the Italian artist, as it had Matisse. Unique Forms of Continuity in

Space seems to materialize Bergson's claims for the body as the vehicle through

which space and environment are perceived: "Consider the movement of an

object in space. My perception of the motion will vary with point of view . . .

but when I speak of an absolute movement, I am attributing to the moving

object an inner life and so to speak, states of mind." 6 The glistening

bronze figure suggests progress through time and space; its

undulating contours, like the black lines of the Bather s redrawn

arm, intimate mobility and duration beyond the represented

moment. Although the figure was born of aspirations toward

modernity and dynamism, its armless, sexless appearance is

evocative of antiquity, including the winged Victory of Samothrace.

In these works, posture is conditioned by environment, the

direct relation of the body to nature. The representation of the

single figure taking a step forward has a lineage in the history of

art, evoking archetypal Egyptian striding figures and Archaic and

early Classical kourai, a convention which signifies going forth.

This arrangement of the body also vividly recalls late-nineteenth-

century experiments in photography by Etienne- Jules Marey and

Eadweard Muybridge which fragmented the repetitious motion

of a figure walking into distinct increments of movement.

POSTU RE 69

1. Ernst H. Gombrich, "Action and Expression

in Western Art (1970)," in The Image and The

Eye (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), p. 78.

2. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1911),

trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Modern

Library, 1944), p. 5.

3. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896),

trans. Nancy M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer

(New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 46-47.

4. Henri Matisse, "Notes of a Painter, 1908," in

Jack D. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art (New York:

E. P. Dutton, 1978), p. 38.

5. Umberto Boccioni, "Technical Manifesto of

Futurist Painting," in Charles Harrison and

Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900-1990:

An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1992), p. 124.

6. Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics,

trans. T. H. Hume (London: Macmillan, 1913),

pp. 1-2.

Henri Matisse

Bather. 1909.

Oil on canvas, 36'/2 x 29 Vs" (92-7 x 74 cm).


Abby Aldrich Rockefeller

Umberto Boccioni

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. 1913.

Bronze (cast 1931), 437/sx 347/sx 15Y4" (111.2 x

88.5 x 40 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New

York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest

Auguste Rodin

Nijinsky. c. 1912.

Bronze (cast 1958), 7'/4 x 2'/4 x y/2" (18.4 x 5.7 x


Louise Reinhardt Smith Bequest

Barbara Morgan

Merce Cunningham— Totem Ancestor. 1942.

Gelatin silver print, i83/sx 133/s" (46.9 x 33.9 cm).


Harriette and Noel Levine in honor of Richard E.

Oldenburg. ©Barbara Morgan, 1942

Ern EST J. Bellocq

Untitled, c. 1912.

Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print by Lee

Friedlander from the original negative, c. 1966-69,

9'J/'6 x 7'3/i6" (25.4 x 20.2 cm). The Museum of

Modern Art, New York. Gift of Lee Friedlander

Paul Gauguin

The Moon and The Earth (Hina Tefatou). 1893.

Oil on burlap, 45 x 2472" (H4-3 x 62.2 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lillie P.

Bliss Collection

Pau l Caucu IN

Watched by the Spirit of the Dead (Manao Tupapau)

from the series Noa Noa. 1893-94, reprinted 1921.

Woodcut, plate: 8 '/i6 x 14" (20.5 x 35.5 cm). Publisher

and printer: Pola Gauguin, Copenhagen. Edition:

100. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lillie P.

Bliss Collection

Aristide Maillol

Crouching Woman. 1930.

Bronze, 63/s x g3/s x 43/4" (16.2x23.8x12.1 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Louise

Reinhardt Smith Bequest

Dorothea Lance

Street Demonstration, San Francisco. 1933.

Gelatin silver print, i77/'6 x 13" (44.4 x 33 cm).


jTOP'ANEtf

ivtfofr

I 79

Auguste Rodin

Naked Balzac with Folded Arms. 1892.

Bronze (cast 1966), 29 x i2'/8X i35/s" (75.5 x 30.8 x


Gift of the B. G. Cantor Art Foundation

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, M. de Lauradour

Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Nashville

A man in black jacket and top hat relaxes into a wicker chair, legs crossed and

hands resting gracefully on his lap as he smokes a pipe. His bristling red hair

and beard in part inspired Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to make this 1897 portrait

Sarah Ganz of M. de Lauradour (p. 83). The sitter's gaze is directed toward a bed on which

lie, suggestively, a pair of woman's shoes, indicating that he is in a brothel

(actually staged in the artist's studio). He is a dandy in demeanor and deport

ment; his body is placed parallel to the picture plane, pressed close to its surface,

inviting our inspection of his posture and physiognomy. Another man assumes

the same posture in Louise Dahl-Wolfe's photograph Nashville (p. 82), this time

in an abandoned and worn theater. This resident of the Tennessee Great

Smoky Mountains slouches into a front row seat, legs crossed and hands in his

lap, his head cocked forward and his gaze directed off to the left.

Toulouse-Lautrec painted his portrait of M. de Lauradour during a period

in the artist's oeuvre when he was fascinated by body type and physiognomy as

a vehicle of psychological investigation, often seeking out subjects with strong

physical characteristics and peculiar faces. This interest stems directly from

Lautrec's profound admiration for Edgar Degas, whose realist project coin

cided with, and was in part fueled by, the especially popular development of

physiognomies. This pseudo-science was founded on the belief that the human

form, along with costume and environment, could be read as a text, unmasking

a subject's inner state, social class, and metier. Edmund Duranty's "The New

Painting," a 1876 review of the second Impressionist Exhibition, celebrates

Degas's technique of isolating components that disclose everything about the

whole: "By means of a back, we want a temperament, an age, a social condition

to be revealed; through a pair of hands, we should be able to express a magistrate

or a tradesman; by a gesture, a whole series of feelings. A physiognomy will tell

us that this fellow is certainly an orderly, dry, meticulous man, whereas that one

is carelessness and disorderliness itself." 1 In a carefully contrived casualness,

Lautrec achieves intimacy and immediacy that permits the viewer to discern

temperament, age, and social condition through the rendering of M. de

Lauradour's back, hands, and gesture. His easy casualness, disinterested look,

and impeccable attire show him to be a man of wealth, leisure, and perhaps

easily given to insolence.2 It was the distinctive, telling demeanor of the sitter

that prompted the artist to construct a composition to frame and accentuate

the subject's posture, which becomes, in this painting, a window into his social

and psychological state.

Dahl-Wolfe's image belongs to a series of photographs, taken during the

Depression, of Tennessee mountain folk. Nashville falls early in Dahl-Wolfe's

career as a photographer; she went on to revolutionize the scope of fashion

photography in later years. In many respects Dahl-Wolfe carries on Duranty's

challenge to artists issued almost half a century earlier. The sitter's retiring

posture and threadbare attire intimate the oppression of his social class. As in

Lautrec's portrait, the subject appears close to the picture plane, on offer for our

inspection. Although it was the natural deportment of this man that initially

attracted the artist, his telling posture is accentuated by the photographer's

decision to place her camera above, looking down on him. Despite the fact that

body posture is similar in these images, the meaning derived from the arrange

ment of the body differs in its details: Dahl-Wolfe's subject is more hunched

over, his clothes more ragged, his gaze more insecure and questioning, his setting

not one of masculine privilege, but of emptiness and isolation.

Our ability to read these postures actually exists independently of how

they are registered by the artist in painting or photograph. In his discussion on

pose in "The Photographic Message," Roland Barthes states: "The actual pose of

the subject prepares the reading of the signfieds of connotation: the photography

signifies . . . only because there exists a stock of stereotyped attitude which con

stitute ready-made elements of signification."3 In other words, what makes

posture legible in an image depends primarily on the fact that it is socially and

culturally inscribed. The viewer draws upon "a 'historical grammar' of icono-

graphic connotation."4 It is an understanding of body language that permits

posture to be read, and the manner in which a body is represented

in an image serves to temper and explicate a specific reading of

the depicted figure.

These images are not only portraits of two men, but studies

of their milieus. Their bodies' interaction with their given envi

ronments aids in our understanding of them. These representa

tions do not conform to the conventions of portrait postures,

which traditionally implied decorum and morality in favor of the

seemingly candid, relaxed, and contextual.5 This violation of the

expectations of portraiture —a man alone in a dilapidated theater,

or in a brothel instead of a more elevating locale—beguiles us into

thinking that we are privy to that reality of the sitter's life. This is

due in part to the fact that the body is often perceived as expressive

of some inner, pre-linguistic emotional state and therefore body

language is thought to reveal some truth about its source of

expression. As one sociologist has articulated this: "While we think

that speech as an examplar of language and culture can cover over

the 'real' attitude of the speaker, body movement, it is thought,

does not; it reveals it."6 Therefore, a reading of posture lends

speech to the work of art.

POSTU RE 8i

1. Edmund Duranty,"The New Painting:

concerning the Group of Artists exhibiting

at the Durand-Ruel Galleries (1876)," in

Linda Nochlin, ed., Impressionism and Post-

Impressionism, 1874-1904, Sources and

Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-

Hall, 1966), p. 5.

2. There is very little known of M. de Lauradour

despite this portrait and an encounter that

Lautrec witnessed in which Lauradour physi

cally assaulted a man on the street who had

insulted him. See Henri Perruchot, Toulouse-

Lautrec, trans. Humphrey Hare (Cleveland

and New York: Wold Publishing, i960), p. 234.

3. Roland Barthes, "The Photographic Message,"

in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard

Howard (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1991), p. 10.

4. Ibid.

5. Linda Nochlin, "Impressionist Portraits and

the Construction of Modern Identity," in

Colin B. Bailey, Renoir's Portraits: Impressions

of an Age (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 1997), pp. 53-75.

6. Helen Thomas, Dance, Modernity and

Culture: Explorations in the Sociology of

Dance (London and New York: Routledge,

1995), PP- 6-7-

Louise Dahl-Wolfe

Nashville. 1932.

Gelatin silver print, 127/s x g'/s" (32.7 x 23.1 cm).


photographer


M. de Lauradour. 1897.

Oil and gouache on cardboard, 26Y4 x 3272" (68 x


The William S. Paley Collection

Willard Van Dyke

Ansel Adams at 683 Brockhurst, San Francisco. 1932.

Gelatin silver print, g5/i6 x 7'/4" (23.6 x 18.4 cm).


photographer

Paul Gauguin

Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan. 1889.

Watercolor and pencil on paper, 63/e x 4J2" (16.4 x


Gift of Arthur G. Altschul

George Platt Lynes

Lincoln Kirstein. c. 1940.

Gelatin silver print, 95/.6 x 71/.," (23.6 x 18.4 cm).


Russell Lynes


The Seated Clowness from the portfolio Elles. 1896.

Lithograph, sheet: 207/sx i57/8" (53 x 40.3 cm).

Publisher: Editions Pellet, Paris. Printer: Auguste

Clot, Paris. Edition: 100. The Museum of Modern

Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller

Auguste Rodi n

Study for The Gates of Hell. c. 1900-08.

Watercolor and pencil on paper, 13 x 93/4" (33 x


Bequest of Mina Turner

Barbara Morgan

Martha Graham— Letter to the World (Kick). 1940.

Gelatin silver print, 14x18 3/s" (37.4 x 46.7 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. John

Spencer Fund. ©Barbara Morgan, 1940

El Lissitzky

The New One from the portfolio Figurines, Plastic

representation of the electro-mechanical production

entitled "Victory over the Sun." 1920-21 ,

published 1923.

Lithograph, sheet: 21 x 1713/i6" (53.3 x 45.4 cm).

Printer: Robert Leunis & Chapman, Hannover.


Purchase

I 9i

OSKAR SCHLEMMER

Study for The Triadic Ballet, c. 1921-23.

Gouache, brush and ink, incised enamel, and cut-

and-pasted photographs on paper, 225/s x i45/s"


New York. Gift of Lily Auchincloss

PAIRS

Seydou Ke'i'ta

Bamako (detail; see p. 97). 1956-57.

EdouardVuillard, Mother and Sister of the Artist

Seydou Kei'ta, Bamako

Edouard Vuillard is often called an "intimist" painter, a description that seems

to fit perfectly his rendering of Mother and Sister of the Artist, given its small

size and delicacy of handling, and the circumscribed interior view that pre

sents an intimate, domestic scene (p. 96). Yet, the painting is not the modest,

Maria del Carmen unassuming work it may at first seem to be.

Gonzalez Painted in 1893, it shows Vuillard's mother, born Marie Michaud, the

daughter of a Parisian textile designer and manufacturer, sitting next to her

only daughter, also called Marie. His sister was seven years older than Vuillard,

and the year the picture was painted, she married his fellow artist and friend,

Ker-Xavier Roussel. Up to this point, she had worked for her mother, who,

although widowed at an early age, built up a dressmaking business within

the home.

The family portrait is a traditional subject, and often a very revealing one.

In this painting, family tension is implied. The daughter bends in a supplicant

position. (If she were to stand, her head would be cropped off by the top edge

of the painting.) The room appears to close in on her. The gridded textile of

her dress merges with the speckled patterning of the wallpaper, causing her to

dissolve into the wall, seeming merely part of the wallpaper —or, at best, a

fragile, wraithlike apparition, floating in the space of the picture, clutching the

wall for support, a subordinate figure to the bulk of her seated mother.

The aggressive posture of her mother, legs spread apart beneath an unre-

vealing dress, her feet planted firmly on the ground, seems almost a subversion

of femininity at the service of maternal power. The sheer blackness of the figure's

dress draws the viewer's attention to it; one is also struck by the solidity of her

form and the stark contrast of her pale face and gnarled hands. Beside her are

the remnants of a meal: an almost empty plate, a wine bottle, and a napkin

strewn at the edge of the table. Surely, a message is to be drawn from this. The

arrangement of the two figures and their setting tell a story, and the artist's

technical means both support and disguise the story.

In Seydou Keita's Bamaho of 1956-57 a quite different familial situation is

shown (p. 97). A young girl, her legs slightly apart and her barely visible right

arm drawn tightly next to her body, looks directly at the camera. She wears a

multipatterned, layered dress with an apronlike piece of cloth that is diagonally

striped, rather like her father's tie. Her large, cornelian necklace, apparently her

mother's,1 hangs down over her protruding belly. She gently grasps the right

hand of her father, an elegantly dressed man. In contrast to his daughter, who is

dressed in native costume, he wears Western attire: a suit with cuffed trousers,

a shirt and tie, and dress shoes; a pith helmet is propped against his hip. He

both glances at the camera and beyond it. Each figure has a suggestion of a

smile gracing the lips, but the girl's chin is tucked modestly into her neck while pairs | 95

the man's posture is a subtly proud one. They stand on a dirt floor strewn with

rocks. Behind them, a flat plane formed by a textile with an arabesque design

creates an extremely shallow space somewhat resembling a stage backdrop;

presumably, this is the impromptu photographer's studio.

The patterning behind the two figures serves a display function, not a

psychological function, as in the case of the Vuillard. According to Andre

Magnin, "Keita says repeatedly that his only concern was to satisfy his customers

by capturing their portraits as clearly and as favorably as possible. Each of his

photographs carries an obligation. Each photograph fulfilled the wish of each

person photographed. He made no effort to become acquainted with his

subjects, who were making strictly private commissions for strictly personal

use."2 The photographer himself commented: "After all, the customer is only

trying to look as good as possible. In Bamako we say I ka nye tan which in

English means 'you look well,' but in fact it means 'you look beautiful like that.'

Art is beauty."3

This photograph, like Vuillard's painting, tells a story. It was taken in

Bamako, the capital of the French Sudan, now known as Mali. The photograph

and others document individuals and, in turn, the development of the urban

ization of this important trading city. Thus, to be photographed by Keita was to

enter the modern age in West Africa and gain a position of esteem among one's

contemporaries. For example, the pith helmet, either brought by the man or a

simple prop in Keita's studio, was a much sought-after object during this time

and was itself a symbol of success. And, if the aim was to valorize the sitter,

then a traditional studio photograph setting and composition were required,

and the subjects needed to look attractive. Keita said, "I always knew how to

find the right position, and I never was wrong. Their head slightly turned, a

serious face, the position of the hands I was capable of making someone look

really good To have your photo taken was a special event. The person had to

be made to look his or her best."4

Created some sixty-three years apart, both the painting by Vuillard and

the photograph by Keita offer contrasting images of modernity. The former,

made in Paris during the age of Freud, shows two figures whose relationship is

manifested in their pairing and in their setting. The latter, made in a former

French colony in the immediate post-Colonial age, shows two figures whose

status is manifested by the same means. In the former, the figures merge into

their bourgeois surroundings; in the latter, they are contrasted, 1. Youssouf Tata Cisse in Andre Magnin, ed.,

against the patterned textile that simply forms their background. Seydou mta (NewYork; Scalo> 1997), p. 2gl.

In each work a story is told through the relation of figures to 2. Magnin, "Introduction," in Seydou Keita, p. 8.

ground, and in the relation between the figures. 3- Magmn' Seydou s story (mterview bYAndre Magnin, Bamako, 1995-96), in Seydou

Keita, p. 12.

4. Ibid., p. 11.

Edouard Vuillard

Mother and Sister of the Artist, c. 1893.

Oil on canvas, i8'/4 x 22'/4" (46.3 x 56.5 cm).


Mrs. Saidie A. May

Seydou Kei'ta

Bamako. 1956-57.

Gelatin silver print, printed later, 215/s x 151/4"

(54.9 x 40 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,

New York. The Family of Man Fund

Jean Dubuffet

Snack for Two. 1945.

Oil on canvas, 29'/s x 24'/s" (74 x 61.2 cm).


Mrs. Saidie A. May

Amedeo Modicliani

Bride and Croom. 1915-16.

Oil on canvas, 213/4 x 1874" (55.2 x 46.3 cm).


Frederic Clay Bartlett

Maurice Guibert

Toulouse-Lautrec. 1890s.

Gelatin silver print, 13'3/i6 x io'/V (35.1 x 26.1 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Anonymous gift

Gertrude Kasebier

The Manger. 1899.

Platinum print, i2xg5/8" (32.4 x 24.4 cm).


Mrs. Hermine M. Turner

Max Ernst

From Une Semaine de Bonte, ou Les Sept Elements

Capitaux by Max Ernstan.

Paris: Editions Jeanne Bucher. 1934.

Line block reproduction after collage, icP/4 x 8'/i6"

(27.3x20.5). Printer: Georges Duval, Paris. Edition:

821. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The

Louis E. Stern Collection

jos£ Guadalupe Posada

The Man Hanged on the Street of Window Grilles,

Balvanera: Horrible Suicide, Monday January 8, 1892

[El ahorcado en la calle de las rejas de Balvanera.

Horrible suicidio el lunes 8 de enero de 1892). 1892.

Engraving, relief printed, comp.: 4s/s x y/s" (11.7 x

9.8 cm). Publisher: Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, Mexico

City. The Museum of Modem Art, New York. Larry

Aldrich Fund

Ernst Ludwic Kirchner

Two Nudes in a Landscape, c.1909-10.

Pastel, crayon, and charcoal on buff paper, 35'/4 x

27'/8" (89.5 x 69 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,

New York. Gift of Marshall S. Cogan

Fernand L£ger

Composition with Two Persons. 1920.

Lithograph, comp.: 1174 x 95/i6M (28.6 x 23.7 cm).

Publisher: Custave Kiepenheuer, Weimar. Edition:

125. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of

Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.

Clarence White, The Mirror

Edvard Munch, The Young Model

Both of these pictures of single figures, in fact, show pairs of figures (pp. 108-09).

In each case, the single figure is doubled —in one by her reflection, in the

other by her shadow —and, in each case, the double gains a presence and a

Maria del Carmen dimensionality that effectively makes it seem independent of its source. In the

Gonzalez Clarence White photograph, light reflecting from the figure onto a mirror pairs

the figure, not with the entirety of its replication in reverse, but with a framed

fragment of it. In the Edvard Munch lithograph, light that is cut off by the figure

pairs the figure not with a fully identifiable, opaqued silhouette, but with a

curiously generalized version of it. In either case, the second repeated image is

less a copy of the first than an interpretation of it.

The American photographer Clarence White's anonymous work titled The

Mirror, of about 1909, shows a reclining woman, her arms stretched out as if to

surround, virtually to embrace, an oval mirror that may be easily confused with

a small pool of water. Both the gesture and the suggestion of water evoke the

myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image and metamorphosed

into the flower that bears his name. White seems to allude to earlier represen

tations of this myth, perhaps to the famous painting by Caravaggio. The myth

also, of course, gives its name to narcissism. Less well known is the fact that it is

one of the myths of how painting, and pictorial representation in general, was

invented. White's photograph may consciously allude to that as well, for it

makes a point of how the reflection copies and changes the source image as

this photograph copies and changes its source.

The figure's face is turned away and gently rests upon her left shoulder.

Just as her reflection is a fragment of her image, her own body, as pictured by

White, does not fit into the frame of the photograph: her left leg is cropped off

at the calf and her right arm reaches to the very border of the print. This close-

cropped dark background allows the viewer very little distraction from the fig

ure and the reflection. (The faint decorative patterning below the mirror seems

to be an Oriental rug.) The figure, placed in the upper third of the picture and

surrounded by murky darkness, invites the viewer to read this upper area as

closest to the two-dimensional surface of the paper print and, in turn, closest to

the viewer. The effect of the luminosity of the figure draws our gaze, and the

mirroring beneath it serves to unfold the whole double image down onto the

surface before us. The photograph, though drawing upon a European myth,

takes its composition from the shallow space of Japanese prints rather than

from the deep perspectives of Western art. This platinum print, White's pre

ferred medium and a highly light-sensitive photographic method, allows a

wide range of tonal values to be created. But White chose to emphasize subtle

differences in tone, not broad contrasts, in order to create the ambiguous mood

of this work. Although he rarely manipulated his prints, White was obviously pairs | i 07

not simply interested in recording the nude. Rather, he chooses to offer a charged,

metaphorically vivid image of the nude figure that is neither glamourized nor

sentimental but, instead, transcends all its literary associations.

The same might be said of the Norwegian Edvard Munch's lithograph

The Young Model, made in 1894, fifteen years earlier than White's photograph.

Closely related to a painting by Munch called Puberty, it shows an adolescent

nude female figure perched precariously at the edge of what seems to be a bed,

with a dark form —part tumor, part phallus, part placenta —as well as a

shadow rising beside and behind her. Her tightly crossed arms and clenched

legs give her a highly self-protective, perhaps embarrassed quality, causing her

to seem to retreat and withdraw from the viewer as well as to pull away from

the apparition beside her. But the geometry of the setting pushes her image

toward the viewer, and brings the apparition with it. It is a discomforting work

with a tensely immobile figure and the ominous companion that seems to be

growing out of her.

The lithographic technique itself contributes significantly to the specifi

cally weighted-silhouetted form in the image, insofar as the ink-filled shadow is

raised literally higher on the paper than the simply outlined figure beside it.

(This is because only the drawn lines, done in grease crayon on the lithographic

stone, are protected from the chemicals that burn the unmarked section of the

stone before the stone is inked and run through the printing press.) The

shadow is, therefore, more form than figure, so to speak. So is the space beneath

the bed, which is what causes the figure to seem to be pushed forward of

the surface.

Munch apparently worked directly from a model, which may account for

the detail found in the face and head. But he was hardly interested in creating a

naturalistic nude. Both his mother and his sister died when he was a child,

and images of the sickroom are common in his work. So are images of anxious

sexuality. This work combines both themes, as it alludes to the girl's experience

of changes in her own body. Effectively, the shadow records that experience.

Like the myth of Narcissus, alluded to in White's photograph, the drawing of a

shadow on a wall, in Munch's lithograph, is one of the myths of how painting,

and pictorial representation in general, was invented. Thus, Munch's work

makes a point of how the shadow copies and changes the source image as this

lithograph copies and changes its source. But the shadow in the Munch, unlike

the reflection in the White, is so changed as to become fully an independent

partner in the composition, an alternative self for the nude rather than a

narcissistic reflection.

Clarence White

The Mirror, c. 1909.

Platinum print, 9V2 x 7s/s" (24.2 x 19.4 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. John

Spencer Fund

(Rt~JL

Edvard Munch

The Young Model. 1894.

Lithograph, comp.: i6'/8Xio 3/4" (41 x 27.2 cm).

Printer: Liebmann. Edition: 8 known impressions.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The William

B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. ). Hall Collection

George Stevens

Swing Time. 1936.

35mm, black and white, sound, 103 minutes.


from RKO

Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers

Marc Chagall

Birthday. 1915.

Oil on cardboard, 313/4 x 3974" (80.6 x 99.7 cm).


through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest

August San der

The Painter Heinrich Horle Drawing the Boxer Hein

Domgoren. 1927-31.

Gelatin silver print, 8'5/i6 x 65/16" (22-8 x 16 cm).


Paul F. Walter

I 113

Pablo Picasso

Painter and a Model Knitting (Peintre et modele

tricotant ), plate iv from Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu

by Honore de Balzac. 1927, published 1931.

Etching, plate: 79/i6 x io,s/i6" (19.2 x 27.8 cm).

Publisher: Ambroise Vollard, Paris. Printer: Louis

Fort, Paris. Edition: 340. The Museum of Modern Art,

New York. The Louis E. Stern Collection

Mehemed Fehmy Ac ha

Two Heads. 1940.

Gelatin silver print, 9^/16 x 75/s" (24.2 x 19.4 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby

Aid rich Rockefeller

W. Eugene Smith

Untitled. 1944.

Gelatin silver print, i33/« * io'/j" (34 x 26.7 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Anonymous

gift. The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith/Black Star

ODI LON REDON

Roger and Angelica, c.1910.

Pastel on paper mounted on canvas, 36 '/2 x 283/4"

(92.7 x 73 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New

York. Lillie P. Bliss Collection

I 117

Cy Twombly

Leda and the Swan. 1962.

Oil, pencil, and crayon on canvas, 6' 3" x 6'63/4'

(190.5 x 200 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,

New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss

Bequest (by exchange)

Ernst Ludwic Kirchner

Street, Dresden (detail; see p. 122). 1908.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden

Edvard Munch, Death Chamber

Edvard Munch's Death Chamber of 1896 and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Street,

Dresden of 1908 illuminate the tensions of disparate worlds (pp. 122-23).

Kirchner's painting captures the whirling energy of urban life, with anonymous

M. Darsie Alexander crowds moving hurriedly past one another on city streets. Munch's print is set

within the intimate confines of a bedchamber, where a family awaits the

death of one of its members. In contrast to the intense activity of Kirchner's

scene, Munch's is static, as if the figures were frozen in a state of debilitating

helplessness. The absence of color does much to enhance this quality, just as

the jarring palette of Street, Dresden underscores its lively rhythm. Yet beyond

the dichotomies of public/private, outdoor/indoor, and color/monochrome,

the compositions are structured in remarkably similar ways. Both employ the

technique of a deeply receding space that is abruptly terminated by a lateral

element at the back of the composition. Even more striking is the dominating

foreground presence and confrontational attitude of the female subjects.1 For

both Munch and Kirchner, these figures act as a nexus for the psychological

tension that pervades their images.

Munch's life inspired many of his most haunting works. Death Chamber

(and a similar painting of 1893) was conceived in response to the illness and

ultimate death of his older sister, Sophie, who succumbed to tuberculosis in

1877, when Munch was just fourteen. Produced nearly twenty years later, the

print reflects the resounding impact of the event on the artist, who had already

endured the loss of his mother in 1868. Though centered on the specific tragedy

of the artist's sister, Death Chamber resonates with a pall of family grief and

devastation. In the foreground, a woman glares out at the viewer with a look of

one just risen from the dead, her arms hanging rigidly at her side. Her terrified

countenance is offset by the featureless heads of surrounding figures, one of

which appears to grow from her shoulders. In the left corner of the room, a

boy stands by the door as if on the verge of leaving —or perhaps granting

entrance to the invisible figure of Death. To the right, a second group shows

an elderly man hovering over an unseen patient, his hands clasped in a gesture

that evokes both pleading and prayer. All that is shown of the victim is the

profile of her dress—a void of white. In Death Chamber, Munch describes a

state of oppressive suffering from which there appears to be no escape.

Munch believed that the most compelling subjects were "people that

were alive; that breathed and had emotions, that suffered and loved."2 Rather

than simply responding to visual stimuli, the artist called upon subjective

experience to shape his art. To accommodate his preference for personal

expression over objective analysis, Munch explored the possibilities of a wide

range of mediums. In 1894 he began his work in printmaking, a field in which

he would distinguish himself as exceptionally experimental and adept.

Lithography, a planar process capable of transcribing flat, abstract shapes, was

ideal for Munch.3 In Death Chamber the artist ingeniously exploits the qualities

of positive and negative space afforded by the medium. The bodies of the fore

ground figures, for example, are symbolically fused into a mass of black form.

Along the contours of the subjects' garments, the artist has incised the stone to

create fine lines, inverting the definition of form from black to white. This print,

devoid of color and exaggerated or extraneous detail, is rendered in the starkest

form imaginable, accentuating the nightmarish experience of death.

The reverberating pitch and energy of Street, Dresden are altogether different

from the somber mood of Death Chamber. The artist's selection of bright,

unnatural colors to convey the vibrant, threatening pace of the city

has an immediate impact on the viewer. Pavement rendered in hot

pink fills the left side of the canvas, engulfing the figure of a little

girl. To add to the intensity of his palette, Kirchner places anti

thetical hues in adjacent relationships: clashing mutations of

reds and blues fill the image, electrifying the space. The artist's

manipulation of the forces of opposition is apparent in other

aspects of the picture: in the simultaneous approach and recession

of subjects in space; the play between flatness and depth; and the

creation of a strong diagonal that surges up from the left corner.

These effects add to the unsettling quality of the painting and its

account of city life. Here a mass of anonymous pedestrians rush

down the sidewalk, avoiding even the slightest suggestion of

exchange with their fellow travelers. Any sense of community is

overrun by overt signs of fear and isolation: a woman clutches her

pocketbook with a protective, clawlike hand; another lifts her skirt

to facilitate a brisk, anxious stride. Kirchner's street is a spectacle

of human activity and alienation.4

Munch and Kirchner expected more from art than the depic

tion of a comfortable, familiar world. On the contrary, their work

stemmed from a desire to infuse visual form with a release of inner

feeling. Death Chamber and Street, Dresden attest to the complex

and separate realization of this ambition.

GROUPS

1. Some scholars have argued that the trancelike

countenances and extreme frontal positions of

the figures in Street, Dresden are based on

Munch's painting Evening on Karl Johan Street

(1892), though Kirchner adamantly denied the

influence of Munch's "gloomy, misanthropic

pictures." See Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism:

Art and Idea (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 1987), p. 29.

2. 0ivind Storm Bjerke, Edvard Munch/Harald

Sohlberg: Landscapes of the Mind (New York:

National Academy of Design, 1995), p 25.

3. The lithographic process is based on the resistance

of grease and water. A drawing is made with a

greasy crayon or tusche (an ink applied with a

brush) on limestone. A chemical mixture is then

applied to the stone in order to bond the greasy

drawn image securely to the surface. Next, the

stone is covered with a thin film of water, which

is absorbed by the untouched limestone but

rejected in the drawn areas. When printer's ink

is rolled across the stone's surface, it is retained

only in the greasy drawn areas. Finally, the stone

is covered with a sheet of paper onto which the

image is transferred when both are passed

through a press. For more information on

Munch's printmaking, see Elizabeth Prelinger,

Edvard Munch: Master Printmaker (New York

and London: W.W. Norton in association with

the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard

University, 1983).

4. Kirchner's creative energy and outlook attracted

him to like-minded students at the Technische

Hochschule in Dresden, where he studied archi

tecture. In 1905 they formed the group Die

Briicke (The Bridge). Largely self-taught, the

members rejected academic formalism and

superficial decoration in favor of a direct and

intuitive response to immediate sensation. Their

work became the basis for a youthful avant-garde

style in Germany known as Expressionism.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Street, Dresden. 1908, dated on painting 1907.

Oil on canvas, 5974" x 6' 67/8" (150.5 x 200.4 cm)-


123

Edvard Munch

Death Chamber. 1896.

Lithograph, comp.: is'/* x 215/8" (38.7 x 55 cm).

Edition: approx. 100. The Museum of Modern

Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller

(by exchange)

Auguste Rodi n

The Three Shades. 1881-86.

Bronze, 383/s x 367s x 1972" (97-3 x 92.2 x 49.5 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mary Sisler

Bequest

Henri Matisse

Dance (first version). 1909.

Oil on canvas, 8' 67*" x 12' 97/ (259.7x390.1 cm).


Nelson A. Rockefeller in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

Pablo Picasso

Three Women at the Spring. 1921.

Oil on canvas, 6' 87/' x 6&'/2" (203.9 x !74 cm).


Mr. and Mrs. Allan D. Emil

OoOOjOQoqoooc

Fernand L£ger

The Three Musicians. 1944 (after a drawing of

1924-25; dated on canvas 24-44).

Oil on canvas, 6872x577V (174x145.4cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs. Simon

Guggenheim Fund

Gustav Kli mt

Three Courtesans. 1907-10.

Pencil on paper, 22 x M'/a" (55.9 x 36.7 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mr. and

Mrs. William B. Jaffe Fund

Alberto Ciacometti

Three Men Walking, 1.1948-49.

Bronze, 2&'/2 x 16 x i6J/8" (72.2 x 40.5 x 41.5 cm),

including base, io5/s x 7!/4 x 73/4" (27 x 19.6 x


The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection

Louise Bourgeois

Quarantania I. 1947-53, reassembled by artist 1981.

Painted wood on wood base, 6' 9'/4" (206.4 cm)

high, including base 6 x 27'/4 x 27" (15.2 x 69.1 x


Gift of Ruth Stephan Franklin

Wifredo Lam

The Jungle. 1943.

Gouache on paper mounted on canvas, 7' 10" x

7' 6Y2" (239.4 x 229.9 cm). The Museum of Modern

Art, New York. Inter-American Fund

Charles Ray, Family Romance

Tina Barney, Untitled

Tina Barney and Charles Ray investigate the human body through radically

different artistic means (pp. 134-35). Ray's works are encountered as free

standing, three-dimensional objects; Barney transforms physical reality into

M. Darsie Alexander the two-dimensional form of a photographic print. Yet despite their dissimilar

approaches, both artists render the physical attributes of their subjects with

scrupulous precision, drawing out the familiar qualities of the human body as

well as exposing its more subtle (and, for Ray, unnatural) flaws.

Barney, who is best known for her narrative photographs of friends and

family, broke temporarily from this genre in 1996 to work on a limited series

of nudes. Her goal was to investigate the human figure outside the context of

a deeper plot or narrative. By hiring models to pose for her rather than pho

tographing people she knew personally, Barney defined a new set of ground

rules that allowed her to work from the position of a disinterested observer.

Rather than photograph within the confines of a familiar environment, Barney

went to her subjects' homes to work.1 Once situated with her lighting and

equipment, she encouraged her models to move freely before the camera, and to

respond to it according to their own instincts. The poses adopted in this image,

which the artist describes as "impromptu," attest to how various attitudes and

emotions are manifest in body language. To the right, a slouched figure with

splayed legs and crossed arms communicates a self-conscious awkwardness

through his closed gestures and downcast eyes. Beside him a woman leans her

head to one side in a manner that evokes boredom and fatigue. The only subject

to completely engage the photographer is at the left, whose countenance belies

a confident demeanor. As Barney's picture suggests, people display various levels

of ease before the camera, which are determined by factors such as timing,

environment, and the subjects' states of mind. Though some of these elements

can be controlled, photography owes much to the effects of natural occur

rence—as it does here in the languid, casual manner in which the subjects present

themselves to the camera.

Ray's Family Romance, by contrast, presents an ordered if not regimented

contingent of bland bodies —an inanimate counterpart to the flesh and blood

immediacy of Barney's subjects. Basing his work on an idealized image of the

nuclear family, Ray transforms it into a strange lineup of fiberglass mannequins.

On one level, the work is a vision of familial harmony, with each member

symbolically linked through clasped hands. The "father" figure, whose mature

face and slight paunch hint at impending middle age, stands next to his curva

ceous wife. They are accompanied by their baby- faced children, a boy and a girl,

symbolic of youth's innocence. Yet there is something profoundly amiss about

this carefully rendered foursome that is borne out in the features of their

anatomy. The children's bodies are oddly elongated, making them as tall (and as groups

important) as their parents. While some aspects of their physiques are highly

specific, other qualities are indistinguishable. The parents' faces, for example,

possess an uncanny similarity, seeming to belong to one individual, mutated

into feminine and masculine counterparts. As a result of these subtle and not-

so-subtle defects, Ray disrupts the placid veneer of this model family.

Ray's use of the mannequin plays upon viewers' uneasy response to this

disturbing, though familiar, icon. As a freshman in college, Ray worked in a

department store, where he observed that shoppers alternatively perceived

mannequins as inanimate objects and living beings.2 The startling realization

that something seen as human is actually a life-size imitation was the kind of

perceptual double-take that intrigued Ray. When he introduced the mannequin

into his art around 1990, he explored its visual and psychological possibilities.

On the one hand, a mannequin is a neutral and everyday object. On the other,

it is unnerving and ambiguous, capable of disturbing the boundaries between

artifice and reality.

Interpretation of these works is shaped by how the subjects are presented,

their physical arrangement and context. Ray has chosen to place his figures in

a line, a strategy that emphasizes orderliness and regularity. The individual

members are evenly spaced, with their dropped arms forming a succession of

V-shapes. Measuring at a consistent 4' 5", they are balanced in age, number,

and gender. As such they imply a law of averages, not just amongst themselves

but within broader standards of "normalcy." By presenting the viewer with

one version of the American family —white and, by implication, middle

class— Ray raises the question of what comprises the typical domestic unit.

Barney's photograph, by comparison, does not reflect upon generalizations.

Instead she focuses on the qualities that differentiate people, that define

individuality. Each of her models, for example, is of a slightly different weight

and body type. These properties are enhanced by the way the subjects pose—

the way they hold their bodies and direct their gazes. The cumulative effect is a

complicated and organic configuration of angles and overlapping body parts,

a direct counterpoint to the unsettling display of sameness that underlies Ray s

Family Romance.

Both Barney and Ray remove the subjects entirely from the sexual and

erotic themes that frequently appear in depictions of the nude. Instead, a sense

of awkwardness underlies human contact in these works. Barney s subjects are

situated in close proximity to one another but they barely touch. Signs of familial

warmth are also absent from Family Romance, in which contact is ^ Background information on this series was

restricted to a stiff grasp of hands. Thus through their respective obtained in a telephone interview with the

mediums, the artists suggest the difficulties of human interaction. ^ Ray (Los Angeles and

Zurich: The Museum of Contemporary Art

and Scalo Verlag, 1998), p. 83.

Charles Ray

Family Romance. 1993.

Mixed media, 53" x 7V x 11" (134.6 x 215.9 x 27.9 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The

Norton Family Foundation

Tina Barney

Untitled. 1996.

Chromogenic color print, 1472 x 1874" (36-8 x


Gift of Ken Kuchin

Max Weber

Three Bathers. 1909.

Gouache on paper, 7'/4 x 87/s" (18.6 x 22.7 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Joan

and Lester Avnet Collection

Andre Derain

Bathers. 1907.

Oil on canvas, 52" x 6' 4V4" 032-1 x ^5 cm)-

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. William S.

Paley and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Funds

Am lio Salem me

Southwest. 1948.

Pen and ink on paper, 8'/2 x 11" (21.5 x 27.9 cm).


John S. Newberry

Paul Klee

A Stage for the Use of Young C iris. 1923.

Watercolor, gouache, pen and ink, and pencil on

paper mounted on cardboard, 19V2 x 12 V8" (5° x


The loan and Lester Avnet Collection

August San der

Family Croup. 1912.

Gelatin silver print, 8s/«xitJ/«" (14.3 x 28.9 cm).


photographer

Diane Arbus

A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing,

New York City. 1966.

Gelatin silver print, 15'/* x M7/8" (39-3 x 37-7 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lily

Auchincloss Fund

Jose Clemente Orozco

The Masses. 1935.

Lithograph, comp.: 137,6 x i67/s" (34.1 X42.9cm).


Inter-American Fund

Weecee (Arthur Fellic)

Coney Island. 1938.

Gelatin silver print, io9/>6 x 13"/'*" (26.9 x 34.8 cm)


Anonymous gift

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»3001 9

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cover: Man Ray. Sleeping Woman. 1929. Solarized gelatin silver

print, 6V2 x 8V2" (16.5 x 21.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,

New York. Gift of James Thrall Soby

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